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democracy

I recently had some discussions with mozillians on ways they could contribute to the W3C working group I am chairing [1]. This question made me rethink about the magic path individuals have to go through to contribute to W3C work.

W3C is a place where contributions are welcome, free, easy to do. For my readers not familiar with the W3C process, most working groups, interest groups, business groups have public mailing lists for member contributions, but also mailing list dedicated to comments – the lists managed by W3C can be found here : http://lists.w3.org/. In addition, there always are contacts given for editors, chairs, W3C staff, aiming to ease the direct exchange.

But. If you wish to contribute, it means that you have to solve another bigger problem. It means that you have to be able to identify that something is going on in W3C, expecting your review, expertise and nasty comments.

For individuals belonging to W3C member companies, that is relatively easy. Members are represented by Advisory Committee representatives. All AC reps gather twice a year, in nice places, where the W3C staff share both status and hugs. The meeting content is tailor-made for members, with overviews, and focus on specific topics. And this is usually ok. So, if the AC rep attends that meeting, if the AC rep reports to his team(s), that is the perfect situation. But if not…

For non-W3C members, curious individuals, start-ups, geeks, this is another story. They must monitor the W3C’s activities on their own. They can make sure they register to the excellent newsletter that the W3C team issues on a weekly basis. Press, blog and actual publication or specification transitions are collected here http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3c-digest/. They can visit all working groups blogs, wikis, githubs praying that they are maintained. They can also subscribe to the public mailing lists and read (thousands of emails). If they have time. But who has that time ?

I am paid to be an AC rep’, I love W3C; as chair, I am trying as much as possible to spread the word to the public. I am also reporting inside my company, making status updates, consolidating information I am grabbing on different media, creating dashboards, explaining trends, mentioning implementations… This takes time. This costs money to small companies.

This is why I think it would be worth having nice and structured dashboards for each domain handled by W3C, made available to anyone, contributors, developers, but also decision makers. Giving a global view on what is going on in W3C, what are the current priorities. Something like for the mobile area here : http://www.w3.org/Mobile/mobile-web-app-state/ but for all the domains.

I know. This is easy to ask, less easy to deploy. But I’d be happy to help, to make sure all the potential contributors can actually be aware of what is going on in the W3C kitchen.

Open Data – A postcard from France

Last week was held in Aix en Provence a public conference dealing with ‘Open Data and Citizen’ [ http://arsenicpaca.fr/]. The conference, organized by Arsenic PACA @arsenicpaca and lead by Philippe Méda @merkapt, was an opportunity to hear major french actors in the open data area. Here is what I could capture from that open day, mixing conference, panelist discussion and active brainstorms.

Open data – origin and today’s mood

While the 120 people gathered in the amphitheater of Aix En Provence Library, named La Méjane, were very educated about open data topic, Valérie Peugeot @valeriepeugeot, from Orange Labs and Vice President of French Digital Council (CNNum), took some time to remind major aspects of the open data movement. She recalled open data origin based on citizen requiring from their government and politic representatives a better transparency. First laws in the US to allow citizen to access data were made in1966, but since, the topic has greatly evolved, with the arrival of the digital, which has pushed the citizen requirement from ‘let us watch the data’, to ‘let us make use and circulate the data’. On which a number of governments have answered positively, from left to right and from Americas to Europe, with first success stories in Africa. (more…)

Listened recently to a radio show, broadcasting discussions held during ‘Les Rencontres de Pétrarques’ in Montpellier, France [1].

Great topic : Internet, ultimate step of democracy ? The program was driven by a wish to make a status on the Internet. Everyone admits that from Internet development in the 90’s, allowing the simple exchange of basic ping messages to the recent boom of social media where anyone can talk, share and participate, things have drastically changed. To discuss such large topic, the audience listened to Fleur Pelerin @fleurpellerin [2], minister of SMB, Innovation and digital economy, Fabrice Epelboin @epelboin [3], qualifying himself as infowarrior and hacktivist, and finally Dominique Cardon [4], sociologist analyzing the impact of new technologies on our society. The round table was chaired by Emmanuel Lorentin, a smart presenter of the daily morning program ‘La fabrique de l’histoire’ on France Culture radio.

Before the actual debate with the public, each of the guest exposed his or her view about the topic, and this is where I believe the contrast was really interesting.

Fleur Pellerin, representing the recent left established government spoke first. After the expected list of buzz words such as cloud, opendata, twitter, she mentionned that for her the main changes brought by the internet in politic was the new politic time. Just like internet sped up the exchanges of information between people or companies, internet is making citizens able to question politics and increase the pressure related to success expectation. She reminded that the direct link created by social media was often irrelevant or incompatible in a space where politics need to keep mid-term vision and cannot always comment or demonstrate result immediately. Fleur Pellerin re-assessed also that not everyone had the possibility to use internet and some further efforts should be made to make all citizen equals in front of this technology.

Then came the voice of Fabrice Epelboin, the voice of the infowarrior, the guy supporting an internet free – in the sense of without control – for everyone and fighting government willingness to monitor this media. Fabrice reminded that the massive communication capability of internet was inducing highly complex and conflictual situations which were not solved at the moment. The notion of goods being dematerialized and multiplied by thousands (aka your old good MP3 that you used to download on megaupload), which was creating an overreaction of governments, trying to control peer exchanges, inducing spying internet. He reminded that serious and independent studies demonstrated that impact of ‘illegal’ download was almost null for the music business. Fabrice also pointed that behind the control of internet, a huge business opportunity was relying for the french industry. He gave examples of IBM and Amesys exporting technologies allowing to monitor citizen communication over internet.

Finally, the mic was given to Dominique Cardon, who commented the new ways for citizen to engage in the society. He reminded the new forms for people to interact : from collaborative work such as W3C, wikipedia or activism such as alter-mondialist Occupy or Indigné, to political party such as Pirate Parti. He reminded what were the three fundamental basis of such democratic activism, using internet as a media. One. Top to Bottom organization is banned. No way to get a leader in those movements. No one could say ‘we’, on behalf of the group, except if he or she has a mandate – which always last a short period of time. Two. The program of the group is designed by the group at the same time the group evolves. As such, the group can only make a decision after a series of consensus, progressing slowly and taking into account the voice of all individual raising their hand. Three. The actual investment of citizen is at the heart of the political engagement. And, just like the movement is designing its objective while it grows up, rules for making decision are built by the same people who actually make decision. Tthis is what he called the libertarian internet.

Those three very different filters on the actual democracy state of internet lead to an interesting debate with the public – without Fleur Pellerin who had to leave (well, politics never have time !). On my side I would keep in mind a major question that 21rst century will naturally have to address : how internet will allow a vast majority of citizen to self organize with enough freedom to learn, grow up and light up.